Wow!I just pulled A State Of Trance 199 off the 'net (Armin Van Buuren's weekly radio show, so fuck off RIAA - it's free).The first track is the Boom Jinx Break mix of "New Day" by Tilt.Now this is a difficult to track to listen to the first time around because of the breakbeat in it. Second time around and every time after that, the track is sheer genius!

Ok people - this has got to stop. Jesus' face isn't in a cheese sandwich. It's not in a mossy hole in an underpass, and it's certainly not in some woman's womb (http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2005250380,00.html.Not being the religious type, I have trouble understanding why so many normally intelligent people get taken with these "sightings" of Jesus all over the place. The famous grilled cheese sandwich didn't look like Jesus - it looked like a burned grilled cheese sandwich. The mossy hole in the underpass looked like - well like a mossy hole. And this woman's ultrasound photo looks like an ultrasound photo.Why do these people go out of their way to try to see things where they aren't? Let's not forget, people, that the Bible is a work of fiction, written 2000 years ago, and variously translated and re-written over the last 2 millenia. If you religious types want something to ask questions about, don't go claiming Jesus face is in the rocks outside your house. Use your time usefully to ask why there's not one mention of the bloke between his 13th and 30th birthday. I mean if he was a messiah, don't you think the story-tellers would have had a little more interest in him? If the guy was so important, missing 18 years of his life story is a bit of an oversight.

Why in God's name would you design a keyboard like the one I've just been given at the office here? Apart from the Microsoft name, which explains a lot, this keyboard is just wrong. They've decided to make two subtle changes to the layout of the keys which are just killing me in terms of lost data and sheer annoyance.First, they've grouped the functions keys into 4 groups of 3 instead of 3 groups of 4.Second, they've re-arranged the cluster of keys containing home/end/pgup/pgdn and delete. Worst, the delete key is now in the wrong place, and is huge. And it's right next to the enter key. I've lost a considerable amount of work and data this morning because of this stupid fucking layout. Plus it takes three times as long to type anything because the keyboard has this annoying bib thing under the space bar which prevents you from being able to reach any of the keys properly. It's an ergonomic nightmare!!!I also discovered that the f-keys have been "helpfully" defaulted to not be the f-keys any more. Now they're help, undo, redo, new, open etc etc. To make them behave like function keys, you need to hit a key called "F-lock". The problem then is that when that's on, the printscreen button doesn't work because the "F-lock" turns "printscreen" into "insert".AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAArrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggghh! Why, Microsoft, why? Do you hate everyone who owns a computer? Or is the whole company just staffed by incompetent retards?

Victory!. The Dutch voted out the EU Constitution today. Hot on the heels of the French vote last week, that's pretty much the end of that. I'm all for Europe, being European and all, but there's a limit to how much power you want to give a country with a history like Germany.

I'm thinking that if the most laid back people on the planet are giving it the finger, perhaps Europe should give the its proposed Constitution another look.

Methinks the politicians didn't think anyone would read it, and would all be bludgeoned into voting "yes". Sort of like the Americans were bludgeoned into voting for B*sh by his fear tactics.

Still, this means the Euro is going to weaken so it won't cost us quite so much when we go back to visit this Autumn :-)

I like this blurb about Michael Crichton's new novel "State Of Fear" from Amazon's review page:

If Crichton is right – if the scientific evidence for global warming is thin; if the environmental movement, ignoring science, has gone off track; if we live in what he in his Author’s Message calls a "State of Fear," a "near-hysterical preoccupation with safety that’s at best a waste of resources and a crimp on the human spirit, and at worst an invitation to totalitarianism" – then his extraordinary new thriller may in time be viewed as a landmark publication, both cautionary and prophetic.

Never a truer statement, in my opinion. "Scientific evidence for global warming is thin; the environmental movement, ignoring science, has gone off track".

But that's just me. Let's not forget that one good volcano a year can dump more toxins and greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere than the world's industries (even America) could ever hope to.

I loved this on Fark today:The fallacy of Bush supporters, is two-fold. First, while Clinton and his security advisors certainly believed Saddam probably had WMDs, that was a BELIEF which is a little bit less than most people put the bar at for starting a unilateral war of aggression. All of the intelligence Bush used or cited was caveated to the extreme, or flimsy (e.g. one person anecdote), or contradicted by other agencies such as the IAEA and the State Department. Therefore, while Bush may have believed that this was the case, he had to have a little bit more than that to start a war legally. This is why Clinton never invaded Iraq, although he probably would have if he had solid enough information about Saddams alleged WMD stockpiles. This is why Bush's pulling on the weapons inspectors immediately prior to the start of the war, and before they could offer proof of his actual capabilities, stinks to high heaven of Bush KNOWING that the intelligence is flimsy and needing to go in before it was shown to the public that way.All of the investigations into this intelligence supports the analysis that the majority of it was very fragile and caveated by the agencies, which is why it was not deemed as an acceptable basis for invasion by any other country, including our own, until Bush came into office with a predetermined plan to invade Iraq. If you don't think he came in on 1/20 with the idea to invade you are naive, go look at the PNAC proposal, and what Richard Clarke and others in the administration have publicly testified too, and now the Downing Street Memo is further documentation of this fact.

This notion of Bush being impeached is starting to reach the mainstream press. The Boston Globe have an editorial about it today, again referring to the documents and evidence proving that the UK and the US had to manufacture a reason to go to war because in reality there wasn't one. This also leaves the way open to get Blair removed from office for the same reasons.I mean lets face it - which is worse? Getting a blow job in the oval office and lying about it? Or taking 2 nations to war and getting 2,000 of their children killed, over 20,000 maimed and injured because of a lie. Frankly, I think anyone who is a reasonable, intelligent human being, would vote for impeachment of B*sh.

I'm just a big softie. I'm getting upset at the moment because our cat, who is too cute, is having trouble with the cat flap. Well - she's not, it's her key collar which was playing up. The infra-red sensor on the flap wasn't seeing it, or the battery had got a dud connection again or something. I got her a new collar key this morning and then the cat flap itself seemed to stop working even with the new key. It really upset me because Dory (our cat) relies on the inside of the house being her safe place when she's being hassled by other cats. The idea of her not being able to get in when she needs to makes me worry terribly about her. We could go back to a regular non-sensing cat flap, but then we're back to the problem of the neighbourhood cats trying to get in, which is almost worse because then Dory's safe place could be taken over by the other cats, and she could be chased out of her own house :(Staywell (the manufacturers) have been very quiet - I've phoned and emailed and got no response from them so tonight I'm going to the pet superstore where we got it from to see if they can help.

According to the Mosquit-o-meter on the Off! products website, it might actually be possible to be a living human being without exhaling.True.The first question on their questionnaire is "Do You Exhale?"

Umm.

No, I breath in all the time and the CO2 seeps out through my pores. "Here's your sign."

We just got through watching the European Grand Prix and it's becoming increasingly clear that the FIA are out to destroy Formula 1 racing. Two new regulations this year have made the sport more dangerous and less exciting to watch. The first is the single set of tyres rule. Whereas it used to be the case that if the drivers got a bad tyre, they could pit in and change it, now they have to live with it. Naturally then, tyres have been delaminating and exploding all season. This last race was the worst example. Kimi Raikkonen had flat-spotted his front-right tyre and the tyre began to delaminate. On the first corner of the last lap, having fought the car and severe vibration for 6 laps, the front suspension literally exploded out of stress from the vibration, and threw the wheel up and into the cockpit of the car whilst filling the air with huge chunks of 200mph carbon fibre debris (like the entire front wishbone). The car spiralled across the track and backed into a tyre wall at some ungodly speed. Sure, that was safe.The second problem is they've adjusted the wing rules so much that if a driver gets too close behind another car now, they lose all downforce. This means they straight-line corners and all other manner of problems, so nobody challenges for overtaking any more.And next year, the FIA want to downsize the engines all to V8s!So this year we're stuck with procession-racing because nobody can overtake and everyone is scared to death of their tyres exploding and killing them, and next year we're going to have the same, but at lower speeds because they want smaller engines.The FIA have got too big for their boots and somebody in the drivers guild needs to take them to task otherwise F1 is going to become Indy car racing, and we all know how dull and uninspiring that is to look at.